Casey Newton reports on The Verge that Youtube Moderators Are Being Forced To Sign A Statement Acknowledging The Job Can Give Them PTSD.

“Content moderators for YouTube are being ordered to sign a document acknowledging that performing the job can cause post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). ‘I understand the content I will be reviewing may be disturbing,’ reads the document, which is titled ‘Acknowledgement’ and was distributed to employees using DocuSign. ‘It is possible that reviewing such content may impact my mental health, and it could even lead to Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD).'”

This story follows one by Casey in which he chronicles the working conditions of approximately 10,000 online content moderators.

These moderators work as contractors to companies working for Google or Facebook, for instance, and are charged with keeping Youtube or Facebook, for instance, free from copyright infringement and explicit imagery, be that extremist violence, abuse, porn, hate or harassment.

“We are now two years into a great expansion of the content moderation industry. As governments around the world make more demands of tech companies to police their services, tens of thousands of people have signed up for the job. At the same time, we still lack a basic understanding of how the most difficult aspects of this work — removing graphic and disturbing content — affect the people doing it. We know that a subset of people who work in YouTube’s violent extremism queue and similar roles around the world will develop PTSD and related conditions on the job. We don’t know what a safe level of exposure might be.”

The tech companies know some content moderation can be mentally challenging and are investigating tech solutions. This paper describes displaying the images in grey scale or blurring them.

Unfortunately, the only real solution is for people to stop uploading harmful material. Until then, online content moderators run the risk of being hurt.

My take: these contractors police the Internet to keep us safe from harm. In that sense, they are really no different from the fire, police and military services. They should be paid equivalently and have the same health benefits, especially when their work leads to PTSD.